


Of Pomegranates and Pie

by violentdarlings



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Pushing Daisies
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Angst, F/M, I have no idea where this came from, Olive is a goddess, and Ned is a god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 04:15:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3276368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Olive Snook is actually a goddess under a curse, and Ned is her husband and king who has no idea he's not mortal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Pomegranates and Pie

Olive had known from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him. There had been a horrible thump in her chest when she’d walked through the door of the Pie Hole and seen those eyes peering at her from behind the counter. Tall, ridiculously tall but oh, she likes it, shades of the way he was when they first met. And for all his eyes are gentler now, they are as unexpectedly lovely as the first time she saw him, imperious and regal atop his chariot.

“What can I get you?” the man asks, and Olive wants to say, _our lives back, my dearest, my love_. But instead she points at the small sign in the front window.

“I’m here about the job,” she replies, and it’s not a lie. The job is just a bonus, something she’d seen as she’d paused on the pavement and tried to talk herself into this. She’s truly here because something in this building has been calling to her for weeks now, and now she understands. It’s the other half of her soul, standing there in an ugly shirt and a voluminous apron, and he has no idea who she is.

“Have you worked as a waitress before?” he asks, and Olive shrugs.

“In another life,” she says, and she remembers them all.

The captain and the lover left waiting at port for the ship to return. She’d been the captain and he’d been the lover, and she’d been a he and he’d been a she, but it hadn’t mattered. She’d known him the moment she’d laid eyes on him. Olive has been men and women, and once memorably something in between – Aphrodite’s little joke, she presumes – but in every life, they’ve been torn apart. She’s almost given up hoping that someday that will change.

The lord and the scullery maid, the bartender and the man who left for war, the captive and the tyrant, the empress and the slave. And here he is again, his eyes wide and so innocent this time around, and Olive forces a smile.

“You’re going to hire me,” she says, and her king raises an eyebrow. “You need all the help you can get.” She looks around at the Pie Hole (foolish name, she thinks absently); the place is a mess and the man behind the counter looks woefully out of his depth. “Now just tell me where to put my bag, and let’s get on with it.”

“What’s your name?” he asks, and Olive is for a moment tempted to tell him her true name. But merely the utterance of that word would alert Olympus that she knows who she truly is.

“Olive Snook,” she says instead, and offers the stranger a hand to shake. “And you?”

“Ned,” he replies, a tentative smile on his handsome face, and when they touch Olive feels a zing of energy go through her that has nothing to do with the power he wears like a cloak just under his skin. She wonders how many dead beings he has raised thus far, whether he even knows about his gift. “Welcome to the Pie Hole, Olive.”

 

Olive has worked at the Pie Hole for some years when the Lonely Tourist arrives. Ned is flustered and freaked out and Olive’s heart goes out to him, even as she’s more than a little pissed with him. Ned is transparent as glass to her, knowing as she does that there is no way Charlotte Charles faked her death. But the deception of being a simple ex-jockey current-waitress with no knowledge of Ned’s… condition is like second nature. And to admit she knows about his power would be to admit she remembers their past life. The curse they’re under stipulates Ned has to be the one who remembers. He’s the king, after all, and Olive is just the daughter of a pair of siblings. Not to mention he is far stubborner than she could ever be.

The unusualness of their circumstances has manifested in strange ways over the years. This is not the first time Olive has had the gift (or curse) of True Sight, and it is not the first time Ned has been able to wake the dead. The powers they are born with seem to wax and wane, from the almost mundane to the truly phenomenal. There was the memorable existence where Olive was the embodiment of Spring, which ended in her being burned at the stake for witchcraft; also the life in which Ned had been able to turn invisible. And in every life they’ve been forced into, they’ve never found each other. Not truly. Much like this one, they’ve been close but never entwined. Olive got sick of it about a thousand years ago, but every appeal to her mother and father (and anyone else in the Pantheon) has only ended in silence. Perhaps Mother is dead, she finds herself wondering, except the seasons turn and winter comes as it always did before, when she would be released from the darkness of the Underworld and up into the light.

Olive can’t remember when her captivity became love. Only that it did. Perhaps if she had resisted love, she and Ned would never have been cursed by her father’s jealous wife. They would have remained politely but icily courteous for all their days. The queen would have never been jealous of a loveless marriage; it was the sight of two fellow divine beings in such headstrong love that had ignited her envy and her spite.

Olive gave up on cursing the queen’s name after the first thousand years. Now she only feels sorrow.

 

Her king has always had a wandering eye. Olive dealt with Menthe back then, and she thinks to deal with Charlotte Charles will be just as easy. Except she has no power now, save for the Sight; she cannot move at the speed of thought or crush bone to powder in her grip. Nor can Olive admit the truth to Ned. For a start, he would not believe her; he must come to the understanding on his own. Then and only then can things return to the way they were.

Regardless of all of this, to see him with the human girl causes fury like none Olive has known before. And Charlotte is human, there is no doubt about that. Once, Olive recalls, her brother had come to her cloaked in human flesh, but even guised as a mortal there was no doubting who he was. That insatiable thirst (and divine tolerance) for wine, his popularity with women and men alike… there had been no doubting who he was. Olive had wept into his shoulder for three hours while he stroked her hair and cursed their father. _And his bitch of a wife_ , he’d added, _and that whole wretched pack of them. I wish I could –_

She’d stopped him with a finger to the lips. _You mustn’t,_ she’d babbled in fear. _They cannot know. Who knows what Father would do?_

The point is, Olive can recognise her own kind. Or what used to be her own kind. And there is no doubt about Charlotte. This simple human girl is no manifestation of another divine being. She is brutally and perfectly mortal, down to every cell of her body.

And Ned loves Charlotte more than life. The knowledge of it would drive Olive to her knees, but she is stronger now than she was so long ago, in that field of bright flowers before the chasm split open in the earth. She bears it. She bears Ned’s barefaced lies and Emerson Cod’s casual cruelty and most of all Charlotte Charles’ sweetness, her kindness, even as she sets the hackles rising on Olive’s neck. The dead should remain dead, Olive recalls saying long ago to a desperate lyre player. But his music had swayed her will and even melted the stone heart of her husband, a little.

Ned is no such creature of marble and granite. In comparison, he is sweet and warm and full of light. Yet glimpses of darkness flicker through his sunny veneer, and each time it does Olive has to sit down somewhere quiet and dark and choke back the tears.

 

Time passes. Olive learns to live with the affront to her existence that is Ned-and-Chuck. With Emerson Cod the duo solves murders and Olive is painfully aware of the aloneness of her life. The three of them are bound by their shared secret, and often Olive wants to shriek at them that she knows the truth. That the touch of Ned’s hand can raise the dead and then kill them over again. Such power, and she cannot fathom how they do not guess the truth. No true mortal could endure the weight of such a gift and not burn up from the inside out. Yet Ned manages his ability and manages his touchless relationship with Charlotte. And for a period of time that seems more interminable than thousands of years of missed opportunities, Olive exists. She befriends Lily and Vivien, she occasionally assists Ned, Chuck, and Emerson Cod with their cases, and she loves that foolish dog as much as she’d once loved the vast three headed one that had guarded the entrance to her realm. To _their_ realm.

Olive’s gift of True Sight never falters. She sees from the first that Lily is Charlotte’s mother, for a golden rope passes between them that glows with the heat of the sun. She sees the threads of Lily and Vivien’s love for one another, rose pink and wound so tightly they seem like they could never snap. And between Ned and Chuck a fiery rope like blood turned to light, and as it throbs and grows in intensity, the depth of Olive’s misery increases. Between Ned and herself there is the thinnest thread of something opalescent and shining, a link that fades the further it goes from Olive. Near Ned it hardly exists at all. And yet the tiny waves of colour that occasionally pulses down the connection is enough to lift Olive’s spirits. Some shadow of Ned remembers the past. She knows it.

                                                                                                                                                                                       

The time spent in the nunnery rankles at Olive’s spirits, but not as much as the pleasure she finds in getting to cease the illusion she has maintained for so long. She can let little glimpses of herself show, like flickers of divine light shining through the cage of mortal flesh. The threads that bind Lily and Vivien are becoming a little thinner, and then the woman falls from the belltower and Olive calls in Emerson Cod. Of course, he brings the Piemaker and Charlotte, their rope as solid as ever, and once the case is solved Olive returns to the Pie Hole. Ned’s apology makes things a little easier to bear, and sharing her apartment with Chuck is not so great an imposition. For even though the human girl is the recipient of the love in Ned’s vast and beautiful heart, Olive has come to be reasonably fond of the mortal. And then before she knows it (because when you are immortal or cursed to constantly be reincarnated, time starts to speed up a fraction), Charlotte has moved back in with Ned and Olive is alone amongst the dead girl’s furniture. And life goes on.

 

Olive clings to Ned and if this is death, then she is glad it will be with him. Even though he does not remember, even though he does not love her. Yet a hand reaches down to pull Ned up to safety and Olive almost gasps at the black, poisoned filaments that connect the Piemaker and the stranger. Olive sees past the hat and the shadows to find Ned’s father, his mortal father, and wonders how much bearing the past has on the present. If even the slightest part of Ned’s loathing for his mortal father is influenced by his divine forebear’s habit of swallowing his children whole.

 _“I wouldn’t say never.”_ The words haunt Olive. They seep into her subconscious and fester there. What is the point of any of this? Ned is clearly in love with Charlotte. The realities of their hands-off situation have, far from deterring him, only seemed to make him more certain. Olive has spent millennia pining for him, in one form or another, and look where that’s got her.

Perhaps she should move on. The love Randy Mann bears for her is shining and bright, and Olive thinks how easy it would be to fall into it. To never again look upon the face of her long ago lover, to let death take her and hope this will be the final time. No awakening again with the knowledge she is a goddess made flesh and somewhere, somehow, her king is waiting.

Just as Olive decides to let the past remain in the past, everything changes. Emerson Cod finds his daughter, the Darling Mermaid Darlings head to Europe, and the Pie Hole is strangely silent without Charlotte’s voice echoing from the kitchen. The faint scent of honey slowly fades, and Olive watches Ned grow more and more despondent. The affair with Randy Mann quickly fizzles out, and Olive is alone again.

She is no teenage princess, dreaming of the kiss that will set her free. She has kissed Ned before, and no great revelation was awakened in him by the touch of her lips. Olive wonders how she can be both herself and not herself, how she can remember living Olive’s life and her first life and all the others in between. She wonders how much longer she can bear the remembering.

 

The end comes like this.

Charlotte and the Darling Mermaid Darlings have been gone six months, twelve days, eighteen hours, and twenty-four minutes. Olive comes into the kitchen and sees the Piemaker touch a rotten peach with one hand. The fruit blooms into perfect ripeness and Ned smiles, before he looks up and sees Olive standing in the doorway.

“I can explain!” he begins all in a rush, and slowly Olive crosses the room towards him. She had never considered before that discovering his talent might have been what the curse required. Yet it would have to have been an accident. The Fates would have known the truth, would have been able to tell if she had orchestrated the discovery. There is a war happening on Ned’s face. It looks like he is struggling to find the words or simply struggling against himself, but Olive does not look away.

“It’s all right, Ned,” she says, the words breaking her heart and setting her free. “It’s all right.”

Ned looks down at the fruit and back at her, and then he staggers. Olive rushes forward, aching to touch him, but his head comes back up and her heart stops in her chest. His familiar eyes are dark with a power that is more familiar still, and he reaches out a hand to her that she is too paralysed to take.

“My queen?” he asks, and Olive almost screams, the release of the pressure is so acute. She darts forward, all paralysis gone, and touches his hand.

“You know me?” she questions breathlessly. “Beloved, you know me for true?” Ned regards her quizzically.

“Of course I know you,” he replies with a touch of the old impatience. “I abducted you, didn’t I?” Olive laughs aloud in disbelief and joy.

“You did,” she says, and catches his other hand in both of her own, pressing rapturous kisses to his knuckles. “You did, you _did_ , and Mother was _furious_ , do you remember?”

“I remember,” he agrees, so tall and so like the Ned she’s known for years, but different. He stands straighter, taller, a king even in his battered jeans and apron. Olive loves him almost more than she can stand. “That wretched Hera. She’ll be so angry to hear the curse is finally broken.”

“I can’t wait to see the look on her shrewish face,” Olive agrees. Ned looks down at her imperiously.

“Shall we return home, my dearest?” he asks, and they are the words Olive has longed for so long to hear. Yet now the time has come, she is torn. To leave Emerson Cod, and Digby, and the pies crafted with so much love and passion? Unthinkable. For a long time she thinks, until finally she has come to a decision. Ned is waiting with his arms folded and an eyebrow raised.

“The realms of the dead can wait,” Olive says slowly. “So can returning to Olympus, to take our revenge on the vicious bitch that did this to us. But for now, there are pies to be made, and I would see this world anew by your side.” She watches him swallow thickly, loving him with every iota of her soul, and sees the tension bleed out of his shoulders. He is every inch her king but he is Ned too, and Ned has loved the Pie Hole for too long to give it up lightly.

“Olive,” he begins, but she silences him with a finger to the lips.

“Call me by my true name,” she tells him, “or not at all.” Some of the old light comes into his eyes, a flame that burns cold instead of hot, a vast and ancient knowledge and a malice coupled with mercy.

“You have known all this time,” he says instead. “My dear love. It must have been torment.” Olive swallows, and raises her chin. Tears prick at her eyes but she will not weep, not now, when he has been returned to her.

“No torture of Tartarus could compare,” she replies. His big hands squeeze hers, and she longs to wrap her arms around him. She feels her old strength within her again, and catches her own reflection in a piece of polished metal on the oven. She is Olive, but beneath her mortal form there is the flash of something dark and fey, a creature from another plane. The queen of the dead. But Ned must grant her true name back to her. That is the way of it. To keep something, you must name it. Olive has waited millennia, but she cannot bear to wait any longer. “Please.” Her king smiles down at her, patient and indulgent and desperately happy, the smile the same as he wore the day she said she’d stay with him. Their lives would have been so different, had she not tasted the seeds of the pomegranate. And yet.

“Persephone,” Ned says, his voice as rich and sweet as those forbidden seeds had been, all those years ago. “My queen.”

“Hades,” she replies, and the world opens up before them.


End file.
